


Words, words, words

by grotesque_rose



Category: Hamlet - Shakespeare
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Alternate Universe - College/University, Drug Abuse, Fluff and Angst, Hamlet is an emo ball of angst, Horatio is a nerd, M/M, Suicide Attempt
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-09
Updated: 2018-08-10
Packaged: 2019-06-24 12:43:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,353
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15630918
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/grotesque_rose/pseuds/grotesque_rose
Summary: Hamlet is a mess and Horatio won't ever love him back, so whats the point of caring anymore?TW- attempted suicide by overdose.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Heyo -this is the first thing I've really written and I'm aware of how bad it is (sorry!!) but I love Hamlet and Horatio so here's a terrible Uni AU xoxo

Chap 1: To die, to sleep-  
When Hamlet regains consciousness, his eyes are stinging and the stench of sick overpowers the cramped room.

God, what a way to go-

The cool tiles of the bathroom floor press against his skin relentlessly but Hamlet is immune to their touch. He thinks again, for what must have been the thousandth time today, of the last touch he will ever get from another human. The last thing someone will ever say to him flashes up again on his phone screen. 

-Your Father and I are very disappointed in you. Mother-

Claudius isn’t his real Father of course, some form of Uncle-Father-Mother hybrid, (man and wife are one flesh after all) who has never been anything other than disappointed in Hamlet. But Gertrude is not much of a ‘real’ Mother other than in the biological sense. A cold woman with icy fingers and an immaculate suit. Ironic that all that is left to her only son now is the cold embrace of stone. Once he has shuffled off this mortal coil and ended the heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to-  
Think, he wills himself.

Gathering his thoughts is painful, like his brain is a ball of barbed wire he’s being forced to squeeze to cut through the haziness. There’s not long left now and he needs to focus, needs to remember how it was before it becomes how it used to be.   
The cocktail of pills swallowed with vodka- how disgustingly clichéd this suicide is-burns his insides. It feels more as if he has chugged acid than the entire contents of his bathroom cupboard. 

The background humming is clearer in his mind now and he realises it’s his neighbours watching shitty TV. Hamlet wishes he was still able to tell them to turn it the fuck down. This death is already undignified, and a soundtrack of Real Housewives seems almost excessive. 

There is another message unread on his lock screen but this one is from the boy with the hazel eyes and the tight black curls who did not want Hamlet in life so will not want him in death. His struggle to think of the first time they met is almost funny, as before this year Hamlet could not remember a time when he wasn’t thinking. Consumed with rambling and obsessive thoughts, wild and whirling words which tumbles around inside his brain until he spat them out or wrote them down in a late-night angst-and-alcohol fuelled poetry sesh. Another disgusting cliché. He couldn’t stop the constant analysing, re-arranging, re-evaluating that filled his days anymore than he could stop breathing. Hamlet had not been lost for words since he had begun to speak-his thoughts building up against the floodgate of his mouth before at high tide they spilled out uncontrollably. 

What he hadn’t been prepared for, however, were those soft brown eyes that met his own as he walked into intro to philosophy eight minutes late on the first day of lectures at Wittenberg University. The lecturer didn’t seem to notice him, a Prof Polonius that seemed quite absorbed in his own speech, but the eyes flicked away before returning with an even more intense stare as Hamlet slowly made his way to a seat as far away from the eyes as physically possible 

Fuck.

His mind was blank.


	2. Go not to Wittenberg

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Introducing the bros R+G and elaborating on Hamlet's angst because why not??

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry again that this chapter is super short and badly written but I am a bad writer and on,y get ideas in very small chunks xoxoxo  
> Also yes sorry but for /modernisation/ Denmark is a company kinda like the Shinhwa group from Boys over Flowers???

Wittenberg was more than a University to Hamlet, heir to the financial throne of Denmark corporation.

It was impossible to grow up in Europe without shopping at a Denmark supermarket, driving a Denmark corp car, even reading the latest bestseller by Denmark publishers. The landscape of London’s financial district was dominated by Denmark corp buildings, the most recognisable of course being the Elsinore tower, named by the real Father from whom Hamlet got his name and his money, but not much else.

Wittenberg was the kind of ‘free-thinking’ institution that his parents despised and they had fought hard for him to attend Oxford like Hamlet senior- Claudius taking up the fight when the former could no longer. But Wittenberg represented the fresh start that their angsty son so desperately yearned for, and his behaviour after his Father’s death had been so unhinged that the new Gertrude/Claudius power couple was almost forced to appease Hamlet’s wishes. Perhaps they felt it was easier to maintain this strained familial relationship from a distance.

Of course, they were conditions to this deal, two of which were sitting next to Hamlet on the train laughing loudly at a compilation of skateboard fails. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, his mates since the fancy prep school they all attended and mutually hated, had gotten into Oxford thanks to family connections but suddenly withdrew their offers and enrolled in a law degree at Wittenberg. The fact this happened the day after Gertrude had caved was ‘mere coincidence’.

It hadn’t been explicitly said that they were his minders but he knew both R and G felt uncomfortable in their roles as ‘responsible adults’. Ophelia had said that even Laertes was being accompanied by Reynaldo to military academy in France which was surprising to Hamlet given that her older brother was upright and sensible in a way that he and Ophelia were not, and R+G couldn’t even pretend to be. A stickler for the rules of upper class society that Ophelia loved to break and continued to by refusing a University education and getting a job in a hipster coffee shop. Getting a shitty job and living in a shitty apartment would have been a pretty good ‘fuck you’ to his ‘parents’ but Hamlet wanted to study philosophy, and he wanted to study it at Wittenberg, and more than anything else he desperately wanted to escape Elsinore tower and the Denmark corp and the mess that was his family life.

Flash forward a week of drinking games and raves with R+G and Hamlet wakes up late on the fateful first day because _of course he does_ , and his hair is a tangled black mess (dyed), and his eyes are bloodshot because, well, _of course they are_. He’s done enough drugs in the past seven days to make anyone look like shit and he wasn’t exactly the healthy green smoothie, clean living type before. Hopefully it’s the shitty white light in his ensuite accommodation (fancy, right?) that is giving his skin such a sickly pallor- waxy and glistening with hangover sweat. Hamlet’s painfully aware that he’s still wearing the clothes he was in last night and they hang off his lanky frame, so ill-fitting he appears a ghostly shell of his former self.

Poetic.

Or pathetic?

He doesn’t have time to dwell however, grabbing his jacket and keys before rushing out. What a _great_ start to his new life.

 

The walk through the Wittenberg campus is nice, made even more so by Hamlet's prime location, but to be honest he hadn't spent that much time here-sober or otherwise, more preoccupied with fucking himself up nicely before term even starts.

The few students who are milling about outside the Old Norway Philosophy Institute don't seem to be faces he recognises from the freshers introductory talks so he stops briefly to ask a tall girl with frizzy purple hair how to slip into lecture theatre one without getting called out.

What actually happens is much worse than public humiliation however-the staring eyes, the blank mind-the lecture slips by and Hamlet hasn't typed a single word. Again, not an  _ideal_ start to his new emancipated life. 

 

When Hamlet catches up with R + G later in the student union on the squishy sofas, they haven't even been to to lectures and classes they were meant to , although this is unsurprising really as they clearly have no interest in studying the law. Just learning how to break it. Daddy R and Daddy G are both big shot lawyer solicitor people in Denmark corp so clearly R + G themselves are expected to follow in their esteemed footsteps to financial success at the low, low cost of their souls. It's simple - goodbye morality, hello money. 

Lots and lots of money.


End file.
